Facilitating Critical and Aesthetic Inquiry

Aesthetics and the Middle School Learner

            I found this article last summer while researching Middle School Identity.  It is one that I think of often, as I feel it applies to my goal as an art educator.  The article starts with two simple questions: “What is beautiful to a Middle Schooler? How often are middle schoolers asked to think about what they find beautiful and why?”  Aesthetics is defined as “The study and appreciation of beauty.”  The article argues, “Recognizing and creating beauty are critical to achieving the full potential of an adult mind and spirit.”  The art educator’s responsibility is to “make obvious the underlying elements of what is beautiful” and “help students explore their ability to create beauty themselves.  This is especially important for those students who come to school with little exposure to beauty.”  This makes me think of my Intro to Art for non-majors course, as most of the students haven’t been in an art class since elementary school.  They haven’t been asked to think about aesthetics or what they find beautiful in years (if ever). 

            The article references John Dewey and his progressive education philosophy, in which an art educator is an artist who facilitates the development of the child as artist.  “Dewey defined the eternal quality of great art as its capacity for further defining experiences… Dewey believed that no intellectual activity is complete without aesthetic quality.”

            Read, one of Dewey’s followers in the field of humanist education, “argues that the general purpose of education is to foster the growth of the individual while harmonizing the individual with his or her social group.”  Furthermore, “Educators such as Broudy assert that the use of the arts to teach other disciplines results in lessons that are more concrete, motivating, and engaging.  Thus, Broudy argues, aesthetic lessons foster higher academic achievement.  It is this integrative approach to aesthetics that has the most potential for reaching all students.”

            Seeing as aesthetic education today often takes the form of “encore” or “elective,” it is entirely possible for students to leave elementary school and never be exposed to any study of the visual arts again.  “Even in today’s art and music curriculum there appears to be less emphasis on aesthetic study and more on technical skills.”  I have found this to be true in regards to the syllabus I am to outline in my Intro Class for the University.  It is divided into units based on the elements of art and principles of organization, without any discussion of content or concept.  It has been a challenge to transform each unit into something more in depth and investigative for each student, while having to teach one individual technique at a time. 

            The study of beauty should be an integrated across subjects.  “Rarely do history, mathematics, and science become vehicles for the study of beauty.  Yet science and aesthetics are not divorced.”  As an educator, tt is important to ask: “How can knowledge of content enrich and complement the beauty inherent in each subject?”  Furthermore, How can middle school learners, or any learner, “Be surrounded by beauty so that it becomes part of the schema of a rich adult life?”

Topic Proposal:

            I would like to investigate an approach to designing curriculum for an intro to art class for non-majors at a university.  I hope to propose a syllabus with creative and dynamic investigations, leading to visually literate and culturally aware graduates exposed to creative productivity. 

The result and culmination of my investigation will be in the form of a zine.  I am choosing to create a zine because it is important that the form follow the function, in a way. It makes sense that my presentation of teaching art is in itself an artwork.